A Real Tourism Marketing Success Story
Brand strategy + creative execution + targeted marketing = tangible sales results.
Client: The Bahamas Out Island Promotion Board
A consortium of over 50 boutique hotels and resort properties located throughout the Bahamas Out Islands on nine separate and unique islands. The range of properties represented in the consortium includes hotel brands like Ritz Carlton and Four Seasons, all the way to quaint 10-room beach cottages.
Branding and Marketing Challenge:
The Bahamas Out Islands are virtually unknown because they live under the shadow and preconceptions that the only thing the Bahamas has to offer is Atlantis, Nassau and Grand Bahama. What most consumers don’t know is that within a 20-minute plane ride from Nassau and as close to 50 miles from the coast of Florida are 700 beautiful islands and cays that offer a completely different kind of Bahamas vacation experience.
With virtually empty beaches and incredibly beautiful teal blue waters too shallow for cruise ships, the Out Islands were made for nature lovers and active adventure travelers that want to escape and get in-touch with nature, and in-touch with themselves.
Our greatest challenge in marketing the Out Islands was creating awareness for this unique tourism destination, and differentiating this unique experience from the preconceptions and stereotypes of the rest of the Bahamas. But recognizing that the Out Islands isn’t the right fit for just anyone, we needed to create awareness within very specific niche markets.
While creating brand awareness was the greatest challenge, our most immediate and most important challenge was to turn brand awareness into bookings. Or, in other words, “put heads in beds”.
A Targeted Marketing Solution:
Gerardot & Co, and its team of creative marketers, designers and web developers put together a comprehensive branding, marketing and advertising campaign designed to create awareness about the Out Islands and provide direct, bookable sales leads and referrals to over 40 member properties.
Our first step was to determine the true perception of the Out Island brand among current and past customers, as well as from the perspective of hoteliers. Through a very revealing process, we asked customers from two of the largest geographical markets, New York and Florida, to share their experiences and feelings about the Out Islands. We then asked member hoteliers what defined the Out Islands experience and compared both sets of data to the current marketing messages that were being used throughout all media.
Not surprisingly, we uncovered that there was a huge gap between the current advertising materials, collateral brochures, website… etc. and actual customer perceptions. In fact, there was little, if any, differentiation between the images and brand messages used for the Out Islands and those used for other destinations throughout the Caribbean.
Our solution was to take what we learned from Out Island customers and stake out a unique brand position, different from other Caribbean destinations, and especially different from the rest of the Bahamas. While the rest of the Caribbean and Bahamas is commercialized, touristy and “for the masses”— the Out Islands are unique, authentic and natural. The Out Islands are…”the real Bahamas”.
To illustrate what the real Bahamas truly meant, Gerardot & Co. accompanied a group of nine real people who had never been to the Bahamas before on a 10-day tour throughout the Out Islands. We captured their experiences, on land and at sea, through photography and created hand-written stories that were used in all advertising, marketing collateral and on the Out Islands website, MyOutIslands.com.
To tell the real story of the real Bahamas Gerardot & Co also created an Out Islands video brand channel on YouTube. In December 2008, we led a film crew and two hosts on a 17-day tour of the Out Islands to record a series of video Webisodes. Again, the two hosts had never been to the Bahamas Out Islands, so they were experiencing everything for the first time as they described to the camera audience what they were seeing and feeling. Through an online advertising campaign and a herculean social networking effort, the YouTube brand channel has quickly gained traction with almost 30,000 visitors in its first 30 days.
More importantly, or at least more immediately important, was the challenge of providing a group of 40+ hotels with tangible sales results. To meet this challenge, Gerardot designed and developed an informative and highly effective website portal to attract, inform and funnel visitors on a direct path to hotel properties to book room nights. However insurmountable it may have seemed, our challenge was simple: Provide and measure direct sales leads and website referrals to over 40 hotel properties.
Unprecedented Measurable Results
One of the primary goals of this comprehensive marketing effort was to measure and report the success of this multi-disciplinary campaign. Through a custom, web-based content management system and administrative center, the Gerardot team provided the client with instant access to live sales lead data and referrals sent to over 40 participating hotel properties.
After one year since the launch of the campaign and website portal, Gerardot & Co. has provided the Bahamas Out Island Promotion Board members with over 12,000 reservation inquiries and sent over 120,000 website referrals to member hotel web sites. Additionally, our efforts garnered the following monumental results:
- Reduced online paid advertising traffic bounce rate from 54% to 28% in first 6 months
- Increased qualified traffic to website portal, indicated by doubling the length of time per visit and number of pages per visitor.
- Increased organic, non-paid traffic by 500% through a highly effective SEO campaign.
- Magazine advertising campaign increased readership inquiries by 30% year over year.
- Established a successful relationship-based opt-in eMail campaign with a growing database of subscribers. Funneled 12,000 direct sales leads and 120,000 website referrals to 40 hotel properties within first year.